Atlas Shrugged

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greater wealth is there than to own your Me and to spend it on growing?
Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.
Look—" He pointed at a plant fighting upward from under the weight of a rock—a long, gnarled stem,
contorted by an unnatural struggle, with drooping, yellow remnants of unformed leaves and a single green
shoot thrust upward to the sun with the desperation of a last, spent, inadequate effort. "That's what
they're doing to us back there in hell.
Do you see me submitting to it?"
"No," she whispered.
"Do you see him submitting?" He pointed at Galt.
"God, no!"
"Then don't be astonished by anything you see in this valley."
She remained silent when they drove on. Galt said nothing.
On a distant mountainside, in the dense green of a forest, she saw a. pine tree slanting down suddenly,
tracing a curve, like the hand of a clock, then crashing abruptly out of sight. She knew that it was a
manmade motion.
"Who's the lumberjack around here?" she asked.
"Ted Nielsen."
The road was relaxing into wider curves and gentler grades, among the softer shapes of hillsides. She
saw a rust-brown slope patched by two squares of unmatching green: the dark, dusty green of potato
plants, and the pale, greenish-silver of cabbages, A man in a red shirt was riding a small tractor, cutting
weeds, "Who's the cabbage tycoon?" she asked.
"Roger Marsh."
She closed her eyes. She thought of the weeds that were climbing up the steps of a closed factory, over
its lustrous tile front, a few hundred miles away, beyond the mountains.
The road was descending to the bottom of the valley. She saw the roofs of the town straight below, and
the small, shining spot of the dollar sign in the distance at the other end. Galt stopped the car in front of
the first structure on a ledge above the roofs, a brick building with a faint tinge of red trembling over its
smokestack. It almost shocked her to see so logical a sign as "Stockton Foundry" above its door.
When she walked, leaning on her cane, out of the sunlight into the dank gloom of the building, the shock
she felt was part sense of anachronism, part homesickness. This was the industrial East which, in the last
few hours, had seemed to be centuries behind her. This was the old, the familiar, the loved sight of
reddish billows rising to steel rafters, of sparks shooting in sunbursts from invisible sources, of sudden
flames streaking through a black fog, of sand molds glowing with white metal. The fog hid the walls of the
structure, dissolving its size—and for a moment, this was the great, dead foundry at Stockton, Colorado,
it was Nielsen Motors . . . it was Rearden Steel.